After I posted the last blog entry (“Published!), WordPress notified me that it was the 500^th blog post on The Starving Artist. Whew! So I did a little digging and found out this, as well: my first post was on October 17, 2012, “A Meandering History of The Starving Artist.” My first book review was on March 25, 2013, on Harmonies of the World by Johannes Kepler. I currently and officially have 793 followers. (I used to have more but I disconnected the blog from my personal pages, so…) This means that each post brings an average of 1.586 new followers to the blog. My views on any given day sits somewhere between 25 and 70. The post from yesterday has two click-overs, so far. I keep separate files for each year of posts (back-ups) and this year—2021—I have written 90,349 words so far. (Now it’s 90,355.) Yes, that’s more than the average novel. My educated estimate lands at 552 book reviews on The Starving Artist, as of today. I have been thinking about expanding to videos for quite some time, but I felt there needed to me a gimmick. I have now come up with one, but it is book-related only obliquely and I hope to get that up and going in the next year. I have also considered taking the reviews to a podcast. And Tiktok seems to be the place everyone is getting content nowadays? What do you think?

It did strike me as interesting that my 500^th post was the one announcing my publication. So that’s what it takes, then? 500 blog posts over nine years to get a short story published? In the end, the blog had little to nothing to do with it except I suppose in what I learned along the way. Then again, I still believe that having a following is going to help sell me to an agent and a book publisher, hopefully someday soon. Maybe a vlog or podcast would help bring more people in? Maybe book reviews and writing talk isn’t enough of a schtick? It’s been done, I know.

So here we are, reflecting again on the blog and what it has seen over the nine years and two months that I have had it. I have been loyal, though there have been stages/seasons of the blog. It wasn’t always the same, it didn’t always look the same (though that has been remarkably consistent), and I didn’t always write on at a steady pace. But here we are, 500 posts and one short story, traditional publication later. Here’s to years more of reading, reviewing, reflecting, and, of course, publications galore.